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#best allegory i can come up with is its as if im trying to weigh up whether its worth starting to write a 200k fanfic or something.
gatalentan · 1 year
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So this is largely me thinking out loud and i don't expect anyone but me to care about this but. Ok, my thoughts in order
1. I have... maybe 18 years of Wiki editing experience and I am a good archivist. I admined one of the most popular fan wikis (3mil views per month) for ~6 years where I have 30,000+ edits. Yes that's a lot. No I don't know what grass feels like. But what I'm saying is I'm good at documenting.
2. The Abbott Elementary wiki has excellent episode pages, but very poor character pages. This is absolutely not a neg against the wiki or the contributors, far from it. The episode and transcript pages are very well done and comprehensive, and as someone who has done transcripts myself and knows how long it takes, they have so much of my respect. As a heavy-user wiki editor you tend to find your particular editing niche you enjoy and that's your thing you do, and you do it well. It's like any other type of fan creation, like finding a type of fanfic you like to write, or a particular art style you enjoy drawing in. That's what they're doing over there and they're great at it and I use those pages a lot.
3. Character pages are the ones that take a ton of time and archival, much more than I think most readers understand. For a good, solid page, probably 6-10 hours of writing minimum is required to write a chara page from scratch, not including the time spent rewatching the material. To update post episode for all charas from all charas different perspectives, at least 2-5 hours per episode (for an uncomplicated series, for high fantasy series with tons of lore... yikes). For this reason, poorly maintained chara pages is true of most wikis that aren't EXTREMELY active (the majority of wikis, believe it or not, have maybe 2-5 contributors at best, oftentimes just one guy with autism (me, i'm the guy)). People think they can do it, cause why wouldn't it be easy? so they try, then realise just how long it's gonna take and then bail and they're never seen again. It's why most wikis (except for Big series) are an unupdated ghost town. It's unpaid volunteer work for no praise or reward, so it's understandable. It's also very demoralising work. There's no kudos or comments or likes, nobody tells you good job. So it's a huge timesink just for the knowledge you contributed to the fandom, and hoping someone finds it useful, but never hearing if it was. "Anyone can edit a wiki" is true, but I can tell you point-blank that the reality is that most Good wiki pages you've ever seen were 95% written by just one person, and it's Work. The burnout is real and I've felt it, it's why I've been on effectively a wiki hiatus for nearly 2 years.
4. Because the Abbott cast is significantly smaller than the one I used to work on (52 main charas over 4 games vs a core cast of 6+1), writing good chara pages is something I could theoretically realistically do, because it's not as large as I am used to in my last experience, but it would, as I said, still be a huge time commitment.
5. I wish the pages were better, because there's so many times I've wanted to look up a fact and have been unable to do so - and making this a reality is within my means and totally within my experience. But:
6. Because the wiki hasn't had effectively useable chara pages for 2 seasons I'm not sure whether long-time active fans would think to consider the chara pages a resource after seeing them previously and knowing they're empty (I am guilty of this, I don't bother looking at them). So I'm not sure if the time commitment would be worth it. I also don't know if I would be able to commit to iterative updating once S3 rolls around, but at least there would be a stronger foundation for other people to contribute to?
7. I'm also not sure how the admins over there would feel about me blustering in out of nowhere, lol. Having been on the other side of that table I would understand the hesitation of someone coming in swinging.
I don't know. I'm considering it.
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